TRACES OF TERROR: THE INTELLIGENCE REPORTS

TRACES OF TERROR: THE INTELLIGENCE REPORTS; White House Asked F.B.I. About Unreported Threats

By JUDITH MILLER with DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Published: May 23, 2002

The White House asked the F.B.I. and several intelligence agencies within days after the Sept. 11 attacks whether they had had information about a threat by Al Qaeda that should have been reported to the National Security Council, current and former officials said yesterday.

But they said the request failed to unearth the F.B.I. memorandum warning that Osama bin Laden's followers could be training at American flight schools.

Administration officials acknowledged this week that Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, Robert S. Mueller III, were told a few days after Sept. 11 that the bureau had received the memorandum from its Phoenix office in July. The officials said neither man informed President Bush or Congressional leaders about the memorandum.

It had not previously been disclosed that Mr. Bush's own counterterrorism aides pressed the F.B.I. for precisely this kind of threat information for weeks after the attack.

Two officials said the request was part of a high-priority review, or ''post-mortem,'' as one called it, conducted by the White House Counterterrorism Security Group.

According to the current and former officials, representatives of the F.B.I. and other agencies on the White House group were asked within days of the attacks to provide all important threat information about hijackings and Al Qaeda they had received in the previous three months. Later, the White House group expanded the request to any threats that had been picked up in the 18 months before Sept. 11.

''This was not a blame game or finger-pointing exercise,'' one person familiar with the effort said. ''It was done so that the White House could draw parallels about the next potential threat. We all feared that something might still be missed, and we were all terrified about a second strike.''

Officials said the post-mortem was ordered by Richard A. Clarke, who is now President Bush's cyberspace security adviser and who then led the group. They said Mr. Clarke had ordered a similar review after the attack in October 2000 on the United States destroyer Cole.

Mr. Clarke did not respond yesterday to requests for comment, but other administration officials confirmed the description of his review. Officials said Mr. Clarke and his deputy, Roger Cressey, were among those interviewed yesterday in private by the staff of a Congressional panel that is investigating what was known about about the Qaeda threat before Sept. 11.

A senior administration official said yesterday that the fact that the F.B.I. had not given the White House the Phoenix memorandum until recently highlighted the bureau's problems with sharing information among agencies. Mr. Mueller has acknowledged such weaknesses and is working to address them. The memorandum did not contain a specific terror threat warning, two people who have seen it said.

People familiar with the review said Mr. Clarke initially asked the National Security Council staff members on the Counterterrorism Security Group, an interagency panel, to review all threat information that had come into the White House in the three months before Sept. 11.

Not finding any, the official said, Mr. Clarke expanded the search a day or two later to include threats received by the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies within the previous four months. A few weeks later, the request was widened to 18 months before the attacks.

''Clarke and other White House officials were frustrated because they were finding nothing, absolutely nothing about a possible domestic hijacking,'' one former official familiar with the review said.

Because the White House aides could find no information in their files suggesting that Al Qaeda had been planning to hijack American planes, the aides asked the agencies to cull their files to see if they had information about such a threat that they had overlooked at the time.

One administration official said the F.B.I.'s failure to provide the Phoenix memorandum to Mr. Clarke's group might have occurred because the midlevel F.B.I. supervisor handling the group's request still had not learned of the memorandum, which was written by Kenneth Williams, an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix.

Law enforcement officials have said that other F.B.I. supervisors remembered the memorandum right after the Sept. 11 attacks and rushed it up the F.B.I. chain of command.

One administration official said it appeared that the supervisor who dealt with the White House group remained unaware of the memorandum even after Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller were briefed on it.

In the memorandum, written on July 10, Mr. Williams said he had interviewed several Arab flight school students who expressed extreme animosity toward the United States. He recommended that the bureau interview hundreds, if not thousands, of Middle Eastern flight school students to see if Mr. Laden's followers were training here.

Fortune magazine posted on its Web site late yesterday that one of its reporters had reviewed the memorandum by Mr. Williams, who was on Capitol Hill again yesterday meeting with lawmakers. The memorandum remains classified.

In it, according to Fortune, Mr. Williams warned that there was a possible ''effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the U.S. to attend civil aviation universities and colleges.''

More than a year before the memorandum was written, F.B.I. agents were monitoring Middle Easterners living in the Phoenix area, Fortune reported. The memorandum identifies several students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz., according to the report.

One of the students was identified as Zakaria Soubra, according to the memo. Mr. Soubra had endorsed a radical Islamic doctrine of Muslim worship. He was questioned by F.B.I. agents in early 2000 and again shortly after Sept. 11. He was not charged with a crime, Fortune reported. He is now a student at the school.